High performance network fabric switches are utilized in networking environment to provide switching functionality for high performance computing and/or enterprise data centers. One type of such a high performance fabric switch is an Infiniband network fabric switch. For example, an Infiniband fabric switch may provide up to 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) switching on 42 input/output ports. The fabric switch provides switching capabilities to a network to spread traffic on the network across multiple physical links between the components of the network.
Many such fabric switches include an Ethernet Gateway that connects multiple data center servers over an Ethernet connection. As such, the fabric switch includes high throughput, low latency switch traffic streams and high throughput Ethernet traffic (associated with various virtual machines (VM) of the servers of the data center) carried over the switch communication medium. Thus, traffic through the Ethernet gateway includes virtualized traffic streams to/from various VMs that are part of the data center. However, Ethernet traffic streams may have stringent requirements for traffic isolation and independent policy enforcement. Such policies relate to traffic management, firewall protection schemes, packet processing, and policies associated with link aggregation on the Ethernet ports.
Link aggregation is the combining of multiple network connections in parallel to increase the throughput of the network. By aggregating the links, the throughput of the network is increased by forming a combined link with increased capacity. However, management of the combination of the various traffic streams through the port or ports of the switch can be problematic. For example, the switch typically maintains flow affinity for the selection of physical network ports of the switch for the various traffic streams. But for an Ethernet gateway of a switch connected to multiple data center servers, the possible number of traffic streams through the gateway may be very large. Also, some servers may include link aggregation, while other servers may not as part of an overall policy applied to each server (or virtual local area networks (VLANs) associated with the data center servers). As such, fabric switches with Ethernet gateways often dedicate large areas of hardware components or software processing time to management of the link aggregation of the traffic streams through the Ethernet connection.
It is with these and other issues in mind that various aspects of the present disclosure were developed.